Sailors' little secret enough to make you sick

July 15, 2001|By Mary Schmich.

There are landlubbers among us born with the souls of sailors, thwarted swashbucklers who would set out to sea this very minute in search of liberty, solitude and infinite nighttime stars if only the sea didn't make us--how to say this delicately?--puke.

So when a representative of the Chicago Yacht Club called not long ago and asked if I'd like to crew on a boat on this weekend's annual race from Chicago to Mackinac Island, I heard the siren song of my sailor's soul, not the moan of my wuss' stomach.

Besides, duty requires sacrifice. In the execution of my journalistic obligations, I've thrown up more times than is tasteful to recount. There was that time in a boat off Key West researching the demise of coral reefs. Once in a helicopter surveying the ruins of some hurricane. Another flying with the Italian Air Force stunt team, the Frecce Tricolori. Surely any serious journalist would be willing to lose her lunch for the sake of investigating Chicago's great pond.

"Oh," said the yacht club representative, "you don't get seasick, do you? Once you're out there, you're out there for three days. No turning back."

No turning back. My fantasy sprang a leak and sank.

But on behalf of all of us landlubbers, on Friday I went in search of a sailor to tell us what we're missing. I found her at the Chicago Yacht Club, where boats bobbed on the twinkling water and racers sat eating, drinking and talking while the sun bleached the hairs on their baking arms. Mary Ann Lillie, who on Saturday would start her 12th Mac race, volunteered to tell the rest of us what it would be like.

"Some people do marathons," said Lillie, a trim, 50-year-old sales manager with short brown hair and bright red toenails. "I do barfathons."

Sorry. This story is not for the easily sickened. But somebody has to explode the myth of yachting as mere romance. And while others will confide sotto voce that many a Mackinac racer has "looked overboard," and a few have even been hauled home green-gilled by the Coast Guard, Lillie is one of the few brave enough to confess.

Lillie threw up on her first Mac race. And second. And third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth.

"You get to a point where you have no shame," she said. "You've tried to swallow. To breathe deeply. You look at the horizon. But you know it's a matter of when, not if."

She has tried a seasickness patch. "I was out of it for two days and still sick."

She has tried a seasickness bracelet. "My biggest problem was trying not to get sick on it."

She has tried a ginger soda. "People would say, `How was it?' as I'm ... ." She makes a gesture that signifies "looking overboard."

She has learned never to go below deck, instead stuffing her foul-weather gear with everything she might need for the whole race, this year adding an empty brown paper lunch sack in case her lunch returns. Her foul-weather gear, she sighs, also protects her from more than foul weather. She wears Dramamine around her neck.

One year, as 12-foot waves tossed the boat, her mates lashed her with bungee cords to the toe rail and the lifelines, and she lay on deck for 18 hours, counting the minutes, emerging from her agony briefly to coax her crew through the lyrics of "You Are My Sunshine."

Lillie finally discovered a "relief band," worn like a watch, and for the past two years she has been merely queasy instead of all-out sick. And from July to July, the memory of the misery fades. Each race departure day, she boards her boat, Waterworks, with new hope.

If she avoids rich foods, if she survives on pretzels and Diet Coke, maybe she won't be distracted from the beauty of the vast sky and waters, the occasional birds and bats, the smell of distant pines and campfires, the stars, the quiet that's broken only by the lapping of waves and the flapping of sails.

And one year soon, when her sailor's soul is satisfied and her stomach just can't take it anymore, she'll be content to join the ladies who spend the race days on the veranda at the island hotel, sipping drinks, waiting for the yachts to arrive.